by Warren Adler
"We're part of it," she whispered.
"Part of what?"
"The corruption," she sighed. "Of misplaced priorities and injustice."
"All that?" he muttered.
"I can't let it go," she said. "Those old bones were once a person. And that person has as much right to justice as anyone."
"You lost me," he whispered.
She was silent for a while, wondering if he was awaiting further comment or just drifting off into sleep. She said nothing, feeling the first faint signs of the return of her outrage. Then she heard his light snore of deep slumber.
6
THE GENTLY rolling green hills of the Virginia countryside were capped with mist as the rain continued to fall, steady and relentless. She felt no sense of gloom nor did she long for the sun. It was, after all, a spring rain carrying with it the hopeful promise of fecundity and flowers.
Driving alone had never seemed therapeutic. But it did today. The grey mistiness gave her a sense of sweet isolation, as if she were gliding through a bank of soft clouds. She allowed the car more speed than was legal, finding comfort in the smooth movement and the reassuring sights of the swiftly passing dark green fields, the sturdy houses nestled in their stands of shade trees and the shiny hides of huddling cows.
SHE HAD acted out of compulsion, a reaction to the frustration of her expectations. It had been one of those deliciously languorous awakenings, a menu of tiny preludes, the extended hugging and cuddling foreplay induced by rainy days and the prospect of hours of exquisite leisure.
Their erotic needs satiated, she went downstairs to make one of those after-play Hollywood breakfasts, bubbling bull's-eye eggs and bacon, toasted bagels, assorted cheeses and coffee. She brought in the plastic-wrapped Washington Post and New York Times and set the table in the breakfast alcove with the yellow patterned dishes that her mother always used for special breakfasts.
Her inheritance of the family house had seemed a headache at first, and she had rented it out for two years after their deaths. Mother had followed father by little more than a year, a kind of poetic justice. All her mother's life she had stuck by the Senator, had followed, albeit kicking and screaming but, in the end, obediently.
Now the house had become her anchor, an oasis, a validation of her roots, an envelope of memories. An only child, she had treated the house as a sibling, a fact that had not occurred to her until she had lived away from it for a while.
It was not without its ghosts, defined not as white-sheeted visitors from the spirit world, but invisible puppet strings of parental attachment that were irrevocably stapled to her, to be tugged at and manipulated as the occasion arose.
Often, in the throes of some sexual acrobatics, she would find herself rationalizing the act, even as it were occurring, to counter her mother's disapproval. A practicing Catholic who reveled in verbalizing a catalogue of sinful don'ts, her mother in afterlife seemed far more tolerating than forbidding, although Fiona was not indifferent to the pull of the strings. By explaining these perceived sins to her mother, Fiona felt that she somehow had mitigated part of the guilt.
Indeed, just moments before she had begun this breakfast preparation, she had explained to her why she was on her hands and knees on the edge of the bed being done by this man resembling a bear, rearing and roaring on hind legs.
"It's only fancy fucking, Mom. Doesn't He want us to go to the limits of our potential, soul and body?" Surely she understood the soul part.
She had smiled to herself, just as she did in the recollection, and had looked out through the kitchen window. The rain had dyed the lawn and trees a dark green and the grey sky was seamless. The table set, she turned back to the burners on the wooden work island. On the far side of the kitchen was a butcher block counter on which was a telephone. A button was lit. He was making a call. The light disappeared quickly and he was downstairs fully dressed.
"I can't stay," he had told her, distracted.
"Problems?"
"Afraid so," he grunted. His gaze had taken in the table setting, the bubbling eggs, the toasting bagels. She moved toward him and kissed the bouquet of black curly hair in the V of his unbuttoned shirt.
"It's the weekend," she said foolishly, echoing a hundred complaints from other weekends when she had been the spoiler and others were on the receiving end.
"There are no weekends in politics," he had sighed, another recycling of her excuses. Duty decrees. She knew the drill.
He was transformed, no longer the horny bear. His mind was elsewhere, wrestling with the problem that had intruded.
"You shouldn't have called," she had rebuked, watching him wolf down her carefully prepared breakfast with little relish.
"Hell," he said. "I bought us the night."
He had finished his coffee standing, then put the cup on the table. For a moment, it crossed her mind that he might be one of those people who, once satiated and empty of desire, needed to rush away from the scene of their sexual enterprise. She had encountered men like that on occasion and had had episodes of such emotions herself.
"Hope your day is awful," she had called after him. He had wrapped her in his bear hug and they had lingered for a long moment. No, she had decided, he truly wanted to stay and she could feel the tension calling him away.
When he'd gone, she had stared at the table until her eggs had grown too cold to eat. Nor could she concentrate on the newspapers. She truly deserved this day of leisure, loving and release. She had reserved it in her mind. Indeed, last night and throughout the early morning, her body had seemed to demand it and acted accordingly, allowing her a feast of orgasms. Still, she knew that her appetite craved more. From self-pity, it was a tiny step to injustice.
From there it was a circuitous but logical path to arrive at the injustices that had to do with the circumstances surrounding the investigation of the old bones of the young girl.
It helped for her thoughts to sail back to this gritty reality of shop talk. For a detective, the puzzle was always in play in the subconscious. Little effort was required to bring it back to the surface and it came roaring back with all the force of the repressed anger that the eggplant's attitude had spawned. His priorities were misplaced. Time was not the issue.
It was, she decided, unjust to ignore the girl's remains and all that they implied. It was a travesty, an outrage. It deserved more than short shrift. It demanded her attention.
"It's my own time," she had said aloud, as if the eggplant was standing at her shoulder.
She fished a name out of her notebook, Emma Taylor, Fredericksburg, Virginia. It took a half-hour to find the right Taylor, mother of Betty. The long silence after the question told her the truth of it. Had she been too callous in the asking? she wondered.
"Did you have a daughter named Betty?" was the way she phrased it. It was too late to recall the tone.
"Ah have a daughter named Betty," the woman said, in a soft, polite, deep Virginia twang, yet offering a dash of indignance to mask the sudden pain of it. Fiona noted the not-so-subtle change of past to present tense.
Fiona identified herself, then tried to soften the blow somewhat, although she knew it was too late.
"We have some new facts..." she began, then waited, listening to the woman's breathing at the other end of the line. She imagined she could hear her pumping heart.
"Ah'll nevah undastand wah she just upped and disappeared into thin ayah."
The voice and inflection suggested the usual southern clichés. All the predictable images surfaced of a small-town woman holding onto appearances at all costs, playing for approval of the local ladies from the bridge club.
"You heard from Betta?" the woman asked suddenly, hope ascending in her voice.
"Not exactly," Fiona said, lying.
"Ah'd appreciate ya tellin me if ya do," the woman said politely. There was a long pause. "Ah'll nevah undastand," she sighed. "Somethin up thayah in Washinton jes turned her head in the wrong direction."
"I'd like to
come out and see you, Mrs. Taylor," Fiona said.
"Ah would welcome that," the woman said. "Deed ah would." Another pause. "Not a day goes bah when ah don hope."
There was no point in a direct response. Instead Fiona got directions and hung up. She lingered for a long moment. Perhaps it had not been a good idea, after all. And yet something in the woman's voice, the inflection, not the words, troubled her. It was a trade-off, she decided. She detested playing the messenger of death. The fact that she would do so off-duty and unpartnered made it even more offensive. It was also too late for that. Her curiosity was too aroused to turn back. For a detective such an attitude was like raw meat thrown to a starving lion.
SHE ROLLED the car through a long curving exit from the main highway and found herself on the outskirts of Fredericksburg, a fair-sized town, yet light-years away from the Washington metropolis. Following the precise directions the woman had given her, she traversed the main arteries of the town and drove through what passed for suburbs, noting large houses surrounded by big lawns.
She had no preconceived notions of the kind of place in which Mrs. Taylor lived. No hint was given, except that the neighborhood where Betty's remains had been found had been very upscale, which suggested that she might have been used to such an environment. But that theory quickly dissolved. The neighborhood in which Fiona finally arrived was a sleepy southern ghetto, neat, look-alike small houses, each fronted by a miniscule patch of lawn.
No way of telling race, Dr. Benton had told her, as she pressed the old-fashioned door bell and listened to the now unfamiliar ring. A light-skinned Negress came to the door, tall, dignified and stately. Her voice was instantly recognizable.
"Miz FitzGeral," Mrs. Taylor said, leading her through a small hallway to a neat, well-cared-for living room. The houses of black people were familiar to Fiona, and, aside from the tension of her mission, she did not feel uncomfortable or out of place.
"Ah've made some coffee," Mrs. Taylor said. She was gone a moment, returning with two cups, a pot of coffee and a plate of chocolate-chip cookies. Because she moved with such self-absorbed intensity, Fiona was able to observe her without fear of being considered impolite. The woman's complexion was golden and seemed to glow from within. Not a wrinkle disturbed the symmetry. Chronologically she would be nearing 50, but there was no way of telling from her features. Her well-proportioned figure had thickened, but it was clear that in her youth she had been a knockout.
Mrs. Taylor poured the coffee with a sense of solemnity in the ritual and handed it to Fiona with a thin smile. Her eyes, Fiona noted now, were a startling bluish grey like her own, her greying hair naturally wavy. Only a somewhat larger flair to the nostril testified to the Negroid genetic share. It was then that Fiona had realized why she had made the mistake of picturing Mrs. Taylor differently. Her voice and inflection revealed only the slightest clue to her blackness. Outside of this environment she might have easily passed for white, but it was quite clear which side she had chosen, and she was obviously proud of her choice.
As she sipped the coffee, Fiona's gaze swept the room, arrested finally by the obvious. Betty Taylor's picture in full color. Undoubtedly a clone of her mother in her youth, a grey-eyed, golden beauty. She noted that the flare in the nostrils was less pronounced. Except for its environment, the woman in the photo might have had a great deal of trouble passing for black.
"That's Betta," Mrs. Taylor said. From where she sat she could reach the picture. She took the frame, studied the picture for a moment, then held it up for Fiona to get a closer look, although she would not release it from her own hands.
"She certainly was a beauty," Fiona said, once again regretting the tense. But a picture of the old bones had flashed in her mind. It was all she could do to keep her tears from coming.
"A dozen yeahs now," Mrs. Taylor said. "Mah husban's gone now. Owah son is up in New Yoke. A lawyah." She looked at the picture. "Betta was always a rebel. We had no choice but to let huh go to Washinton. To huh that was the big city." Her gaze drifted toward the window. "Ah knew she was too pretty to go so young. Much too pretty. Sometimes that is a cross to bear, Miz FitzGeral." Fiona's eyes, tearing now, drifted toward the window which revealed nothing but a seamless grey slab. Finally, under control again, she turned back to Mrs. Taylor. "But even a pretty bird must flah on her own. There was no way to keep huh in a cage. There was no stoppin huh."
Fiona saw the onslaught of memories invading the woman, reviving the pain of the old grief. Fiona had been through similar situations many times before. It had never been easy and only a great effort of will kept her emotions in check. Her experience had also taught her that the woman was deliberately postponing the inevitable revelation on the theory that any new information would be the awful truth.
It was, in a way, a danse macabre, a kind of game. Postponing the revelation also gave Fiona an opportunity to learn more before the curtain came down irrevocably.
"What did she do there? In Washington?" Fiona asked.
Mrs. Taylor, cooperating in the silent conspiracy, nodded, continuing.
"Worked for this committee in the Congress of the United States. Loved huh job. She wrote often. Called once a week. And then..." Mrs. Taylor's grey-blue eyes misted, but she was a woman who obviously considered control a virtue and she quickly recovered. "Later we blamed ourselves foh the estrangement between Betta and mah late husban and myself."
There was a long pause through which Fiona remained silent. She was certain that the woman sensed her daughter's death, had sensed it for years. Still she held back her own question. Now she was remembering, holding back the flood of emotion, like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. Fiona knew she would be more forthcoming in this state than later, when the dike burst.
"Somethin changed. She wouldn't tell us much. Even when she came home on holidays she told us nuthin about her life except that she still had the same job and she was happy. But we both knew, mah husban and I, that somethin had changed. Parents know their children. Wasn't that she was morose or unhappy. Not moody. She was quieter, like she feared sayin much to us. Betta always confahded. That was what made us think that somethin was being hidden from us. Oh we asked if she had any boyfriends. Mah husban worried more about that than anythin. She just smahled over that one, but she told us nothin and treated us as if we didn't have a raht to ask." She paused, shook her head then looked away and stared into space. "So we went up thayah to see for owah selves." The woman paused and cleared her throat. Then she saw that Fiona's cup was empty.
"May ah offer you moh?" she asked. Fiona declined, worried that the interruption might inhibit the woman's story. It didn't.
"We came up thayah without tellin Betta. It was a Sunday, ah remembah. We had her address. She told us she was livin with some girls in an apahtment on Capitol Hill." She shook her head. "We didn't expect to fahnd what we did. She was livin in one of them townhouses that had been converted to apahtments. She was sure surprahzed to see us. Not too happy, I can tell you. In fact, she was downraht mad, accusin us of spahin on her. The surprahz was owas, I can assure you. We saw no sahns of girlfriends and the place looked more expensive than she could afford. We had words and it was apparent that Betta wanted us to leave and we did." She shrugged and was silent, forcing Fiona to prod her.
"What did you and your husband think?"
"We may be small-town folks, but we are not uneducated and naive." She drew herself up stiffly in the chair. "Somebodah was helpin her pay for that."
"Did you confront her with that accusation?"
"We did. She told us to mahn our own business. Oh, she had become arrogant. While we wuh thayah she got a phone call and we heard words between huh and whoever it was. They're jes leavin, she told the person. And we had the impression that the person on the othah end was none too happy with the revahlation that Betta's parents had come to visit."
"Did you have any idea who that might be?"
She shook her head.
"Any intui
tive ideas?"
Mrs. Taylor shot her a look of sudden disdain.
"We had ahdees." She was obviously having difficulty fighting off her reluctance.
"Like what?" Fiona pressed, but gently.
"She was involved with a waht man."
The woman said it flatly, but the accusatory passion was unmistakable. This, to Mrs. Taylor, was the real sin of the situation. Fiona knew that she would not explain this further. It was simply a fact of her existence. Born on the edge, she had made her choice and that choice was irrevocable for her and her progeny to the end of time.
"You had evidence of this?"
"None but what we knew to be true in owah hahts."
Fiona detested that kind of decree of truth without proof. Intuition was merely speculation. Many an injustice had been perpetrated by such self-induced fantasies. A hunch was not necessarily truth, although it was sometimes true. This was, however, not the time to debate the issue.
"Did you confront her with this?" Fiona asked.
"Mah husban was a man of deep prahd. He felt that Betta had betrayed owah trust in her. We just stohmed outta thayah. Ah do admit ah was also very upset."
"What happened after that?"
"Mah husban determined not to have nothin to do with her. You have to undahstan. She was his little girl, the apple of his ah, and she had betrayed him. We had no illusions. She was involved with a waht man. Bein kept by him in a stahl that she could not afford. She was his mistress." Her lips curled in disgust. "This was not the way she was brought up." She was, it was obvious, having difficulty mustering the heat of the old indignance, but she tried gamely to keep the pose for appearance's sake. Only her sad grey-blue eyes broadcast her defeat.
"You didn't try to contact her?" Fiona asked. She could tell that Mrs. Taylor was coming to the end of the line, unable to keep the illusion of postponement going for much longer.
"Mah husban fohbid it."
"Did Betty try to contact you?"
Her lips trembled. She was having increasing difficulty keeping herself under control.